“Today the world’s top 20 richest cities have forged a super-circuit driven by capital, talent, and services: they are home to more than 75% of the largest companies, which in turn invest in expanding across those cities and adding more to expand the intercity network. Indeed, global cities have forged a league of their own, in many ways as denationalized as Formula One racing teams, drawing talent from around the world and amassing capital to spend on themselves while they compete on the same circuit.”
Category: ideas
Dolphins Caught Plotting Together (Yes, Really)
“Bottlenose dolphins have been observed chattering while cooperating to solve a tricky puzzle – a feat that suggests they have a type of vocalisation dedicated to cooperating on problem solving. … Importantly, the researchers were able to show that the increase in chatter was directly related to the canister-opening task as opposed to social interactions between the dolphins.”
Library Anxiety (Yes, It’s A Thing)
“That term is hardly a household name among students, but say it to a college librarian, and he or she will know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s the feeling that one’s research skills are inadequate and that those shortcomings should be hidden. In some students it’s manifested as an outright fear of libraries and the librarians who work there. … ‘Why would anyone think we are intimidating?’ writes Michel C. Atlas. ‘What is intimidating about a master’s-prepared professional earning $35,000 a year?'”
What If Artificial Intelligence Machines Became Sentient? And Could We Even Tell?
“Even in cases where robots manage to act in ways similar to us (like playing chess), the way they go about performing these actions is very different from the way we do it. Both fish and submarines can travel distances underwater, but it is questionable whether it is appropriate to say they both swim.”
Are Humans Really Smarter Than Chimps? Not On Everything, And That Drives Some Humans Bananas
Frans de Waal: “We have trouble looking at animal intelligence by itself, always asking, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?’ Since there is only one answer that satisfies us, people watching [the chimp] Ayumu’s videotaped performance on the internet couldn’t believe it, saying it must be a hoax. … [Some] American scientists felt they had to go into special training to beat the chimp.” (They failed.)
Here’s The Problem When We Turn Science Into Religion
“At the same time as an ever more bloated scientific bureaucracy churns out masses of research results, the majority of which are likely outright false, scientists themselves are lauded as heroes and science is upheld as the only legitimate basis for policy-making. There’s reason to believe that these phenomena are linked.”
The Web Of Attention: How The Social Internet Is Devouring Itself In Its Pursuit Of Our Time And ‘Mindshare’
“It’s the Faustian bargain we’ve all struck. In exchange for a ‘free’ web, we give you our time. Unfortunately, this structure is unsustainable and is compromising both our experience of the web and the quality of the things we consume.”
How U.S. Coastal Cities Left The Middle States Behind
“The relative decline of St. Louis—along with that of other similarly endowed heartland cities—is therefore not simply, or even primarily, a story of deindustrialization. The larger explanation involves how presidents and lawmakers in both parties, influenced by a handful of economists and legal scholars, quietly altered federal competition policies, antitrust laws, and enforcement measures over a period of thirty years.”
The Problem With Critics
“My objection isn’t so much to the idea that it’s wrong to use your own experiences as a guide to explain how you interact with the items under review as it is to the fact that so many of the critics who are doing it are boring, grasping people whose experiences are mundane at best and often comically overvalued given how empty and insignificant they are.”
How Being Cool Has Ruined Berlin
“Somebody must have written about my street on their viral travel blog. Now I had the whole world at my doorstep; I just didn’t have Berlin anymore.”